Stopped By A Brick

About ten years ago, a young and very successful executive named Josh was traveling down a Chicago neighborhood street. He was going a bit too fast in his sleek, black, 12 cylinder Jaguar XKE, which was only two months old. He was watching for kids darting out from between parked cars and slowed down when he thought he saw something. As his car passed, no child darted out, but a brick sailed out and-WHUMP! — It smashed into the Jag’s shiny black side door! BRAKES SCREECHED…!!!!

Brakes slammed! Gears ground into reverse, and tires madly spun the Jaguar back to the spot from where the brick had been thrown. Josh jumped out of the car, grabbed the kid, and pushed him up against a parked car. He shouted at the kid, “What was that all about and who are you? Just what do you think you are doing?!” Building up a head of steam, he went on. “That’s my new Jag, that brick you threw is gonna cost you a lot of money. Why did you throw it?”

“Please, mister, please …. I’m sorry! I didn’t know what else to do!” pleaded the youngster. “I threw the brick because no one else would stop!” Tears were dripping down the boy’s chin as he pointed around the parked car. “It’s my brother, mister,” he said. “He rolled off the curb and fell out of his wheelchair and I can’t lift him.” Sobbing, the boy asked the executive, “Would you please help me by getting him back into his wheelchair? He’s hurt and he’s too heavy for me.”

Moved beyond words, the young executive tried desperately to swallow the rapidly swelling lump in his throat. Straining, he lifted the young man back into the wheelchair and took out his handkerchief, and wiped the scrapes and cuts, checked to see that everything was going to be OK. He then watched, as the younger brother push him down the sidewalk toward their home.

It was a long walk back to the sleek, black, shining, 12 cylinder Jaguar XKE – a long and slow walk. Josh never did fix the dented side door of his Jaguar. He kept the dent to remind him not to go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at him to get his attention….. Some bricks are softer than others. Feel for the bricks of life that are coming at/to you.

“It was not with perishable things such as silver and gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” – 1 Peter 1:18-19

 Submitted by Myers

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 The Station

Tucked away in our subconscious minds is an idyllic vision. We see ourselves on a long, long trip that almost spans the continent. We’re traveling by passenger train, and out the windows, we drink in the passing scene of cars on nearby highways, of children waving at a crossing, of cattle grazing on a distant hillside, of smoke pouring from a power plant, of row upon row of corn and wheat, of flatlands and valleys, of mountains and rolling hills, of biting winter and blazing summer and cavorting spring and docile fall.

But uppermost in our minds is the final destination. On a certain day at a certain hour, we will pull into the station. Their sill is bands playing, and flags waving. And once we get there so many wonderful dreams will come true. So many wishes will be fulfilled and so many pieces of our lives finally will be neatly fitted together like a completed jigsaw puzzle. How restlessly we pace the aisles, damning the minutes for loitering … waiting, waiting, waiting, for the station.

However, sooner or later we must realize there is no one station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream. It constantly outdistances us.

“When we reach the station, that will be it !” we cry. Translated it means, “When I’m 18, that will be it! When I buy a new 450 SL Mercedes Benz, that will be it! When I put the last kid through college, that will be it! When I have paid off the mortgage, that will be it! When I win a promotion, that will be it! When I reach the age of retirement, that will be it! I shall live happily ever after !”

Unfortunately, once we get it, then it disappears. The station somehow hides at the end of an endless track.

“Relish the moment” is a good motto, especially when coupled with Psalm 118:24: “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” It isn’t the burdens of today that drive men mad. Rather, it is regret over yesterday or fear of tomorrow. Regret and fear are twin thieves who would rob us of today.

So, stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead, climb more mountains, eat more ice cream, go barefoot oftener, swim more rivers, watch more sunsets, laugh more and cry less. Life must be lived as we go along. The station will come soon enough.

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 Faith Without Works

Believe and be saved
the minister said,
Believe and be saved
and rise from the dead.

Through grace, ye are saved
from sin and hell,
So simply believe
and all will be well.

The preacher continued
and read from the book,
How all can reach heaven,
both angel and crook.

When all had been said
and the church recessed;
With money collected
and everyone blessed;

The preacher retired
to his spacious new home,
In his humble Mercedes
with everything chrome.

He sat in his study,
his thoughts running deep,
He dozed for a moment,
and died in his sleep.

He ran to Saint Peter
and wearing a grin,
Said “I believe in the Savior,
so please let me in”

“Oh no, not another”,
said Peter with a sigh,
“Satan’s sure working,
the tolls running high.”

The preacher looked puzzled,
then saw in a flash,
The plan of salvation,
beginning at last.

Believing is nothing
if nothing is done.
In getting to Heaven
you follow the Son.

To follow a leader,
you do what is said,
Faith without works
is nothing but dead.

Satan knows Jesus,
believes in him too.
So what’s the difference
between Satan and You?

Believe in the Savior,
but always recall,
Faith is important
but sure isn’t all.

-Wes Stephenson

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A Brothers Love

There was a family that was experiencing a small tragedy. One of their two sons had acquired an illness that required a marrow transplant. Of course, the medical personnel had all the family members tested to see who had the proper type of blood. It turned out the older brother of the sick boy was the perfect match. So the father sat the older brother down and told what they needed to do in simplest terms for the young boy. The father told him that his little brother was very very sick and that he needed to show his little brother how much he loved him by having surgery. The doctors need to take a little piece of him and put it in his little brother’s body so that he doesn’t die. The young boy thought about it for a couple of seconds, and then he said he would do it.

So the older brother went through surgery. it was a success, and his little brother was recovering quickly. After the relief and joy passed over and the family was just sitting around relaxing, the father noticed his older son looking a little down and depressed. He took his son aside and asked him why he wasn’t happy- his brother was getting better. His son said that he was very glad that his brother was getting better. So the father asked again, why are you so sad? The boy said, “When is it time for me to die?”

That’s when the father realized what the boy had on his mind. His older son believed in his heart of hearts that he had to give up his own life so that his little brother who he loved could live.

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Why Go To Church

A churchgoer wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday. I’ve gone for 30 years now,” he wrote, “and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can’t remember a single one of them. So I think I’m wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all.”

This started a real controversy in the “Letters to the Editor” column, much to the delight of the editor.

It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher: “I’ve been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals. But I do know this: They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me those meals, I would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!”

When you are DOWN to nothing . . . God is UP to something!

Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible, and receives the impossible!

Thank God for our physical and our spiritual nourishment!

Contributed by Carole Embry

Buy Your Mouse Mats Here

Creation Or Accident

How did we get here?  This is a million-dollar question, and there are only two possible options.

Option 1:  Creation; which requires a Creator and faith on the believer’s part; or so it would seem at first glance.

Option 2:  Evolution; which requires an even greater amount of faith on the believer’s part, because if we are to believe in evolution, we have to believe that everything came from nothing. 

We must choose one option or the other because there are simply no other possibilities.

LET ME EXPLAIN:

Somehow we need to explain our existence because we know we exist.  We are not figments of our imagination, because we have bodies consisting of flesh, blood, bones, and various other issues which we can see, touch, and cannot deny existence.

CREATION:

Using option one [Creation] to explain our existence demands a Creator, a Creator we refer to as God.   We require faith to believe in God and creation, because the human eye cannot see God since God is a spirit, and yet; we believe in many things we cannot see with the human eye that we acknowledge the existence of.  Things like the air we breathe and electricity, because we experience and see the evidence of them.   Some people struggle with the concept of spirits, of God, and eternity, because we live in a material world, in bodies that can only see material things.  However, if we look closely for evidence of God, we will soon find it.  If we take a step in faith and ask God to reveal himself to us, He is 100% faithful to do so to the extent that our belief in Him will be undeniable.

Because our lives are so very short, our thinking and ability to see beyond our own lives are also limited.  As a result, some of us may also have trouble understanding the concept of the invisible spirit residing within each of us, and the concept of eternal life as promised to those who love God.

Some people don’t believe in anything they cannot see with the human eye or sense with the five senses, and yet, somehow we must explain our existence because we know we exist.

Some people claim to be atheists!  In fact, at one point in my own life when I was in my early to middle teenage years, I claimed to be an atheist and actively embraced the ideas and theory of evolution.  That was until I stopped to think about how evolution could work, and how viable an option it is to explain our existence.  Like most people, my thinking is driven by the need for logic to understand and rationalize things, and it was this demand for logic that resulted in my eventual rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution.  I might add here that there is evidence Darwin rejected his theory of evolution toward the end of his lifetime, but we will get into that later at the end of this article.

While logic is important to help us understand things and to form our beliefs or resolve problems, believing in something purely from a logical point of view can also have its dangers and can be deceiving.  This is because our ability to reason and think logically is based entirely on known facts and science available at that time, which helps us to determine and distinguish the possible from the impossible.

An example of this is; Before man discovered the ability for flight, rocket-powered propulsion, and space travel, logic would have told us man couldn’t travel to the moon.  Such thinking before mankind discovered the science to make space travel possible would have been viewed as madness and illogical because at that time our thinking was limited to the known facts of the day.  Consequently, at that time in history, we could not imagine such an achievement was possible, simply because we did not have the knowledge or science for our minds to grasp the possibilities and reality that it was.

So, if we are to accept the reality that mankind was indeed created, then that act of creation demands a creator, just as a house demands a builder.

EVOLUTION:

The second and only other possibility for our existence is evolution, but following a logical path and pure science, we soon discover that evolution is no option at all.  Evolution completely defies logic and science to such an extent, it requires far more faith to believe in than creation.

If we are to believe in evolution as Darwin theorized, we need to work backward from the present time to prove or disprove his theory.  Sort of like reverse engineering to find out how something works and how it was made.

If everything that we see in existence including gasses, stars, planets, all known matter, and life forms came into existence by a string of accidents of evolution, it is a very simple process to prove or disprove by working backward from where we are now:

If we suggest that man evolved from primates, then where did the primates come from?  The evolutionist would argue that mankind evolved from primates, which evolved from a lower form of life, which evolved from a lower form of life, and so on and so on until we get right back to the very first biological life-form.  Then we are led to believe this first biological life form miraculously evolved from non-biological matter.

If evolution was indeed possible; every living thing, every mineral, chemical, gas and all matter in the universe had to evolve from something lower down the evolutionary chain and had to have a beginning.  If we keep asking the question; and what did that evolve from, and what did that evolve from, and so on, we would eventually get right back to the very first two atoms or cosmic particles in the universe that somehow miraculously found each other in all that space, and that space is Very, Very Big.

The evolutionist would then have us believe that after these two original particles miraculously found each other, they exploded in awesome atomic fashion resulting in all the matter we see evidenced in the universe today.   They would have us believe that gaseous and solid matter must have split, divided, and multiplied like a biological cell, and grown from two single atomic particles into all the matter in existence in the universe today.  Strangely enough, we do not see rock and other solid matter dividing and multiplying in nature these days, as would have been required for this theory to be viable or have any possibility of being true.  Two atoms could not possibly cause or explain the existence of all the matter in the universe today.

To believe that the first two tiny cosmic particles in existence somehow got together in all that space, resulting in a big bang and chain reaction of universal proportions is quite a stretch;  A stretch that requires an extraordinary amount of faith to swallow, even for the most faith-filled evolutionist.

Why? Because I am sure we can all agree that ‘nothing can create itself from nothing’;

meaning; that something that does not exist, cannot decide to exist, or make itself exist, because it doesn’t exist.   This leaves evolution with very a big problem because if we could convince ourselves that all the life forms and matter that exists in the universe today originally came from the joining together of the first two first cosmic particles,then where did they come from?  They did not make themselves, because we know that nothing can create itself from nothing.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, physicist, geologist, or biologist to figure that out.  If you asked someone if this were possible, they would likely ask you what you had been smoking, or, they might even be tempted to have you collected by men in white coats to have your mental status checked and evaluated.

I can just imagine the psych report now:  Hmmmm, This patient seems to be suffering from serious delusions of fantasy.  He or she believes that two atoms can create themselves from nothing, then reproduce themselves over and over, and then eventually evolve and change themselves into every conceivable substance, mineral, chemical, gas, and every other form of matter including biological life forms of the most fantastic and complex kind.  We are going to need some really strong drugs and a lot of therapy to treat this one guy! 

In saying that, while I am having a bit of fun here making a joke of how crazy it is to believe in evolution, I remind everyone reading this article that I also bought into, and at one time believed in this fantasy.  That was until I looked at the science, and thought about the processes involved that would have needed to occur for this theory to be a viable proposition.  Then, after consideration of the facts, I finally got a clue and discovered how seriously impossible this theory is, so I moved on to the absolute reality that I now needed a creator to explain the existence of all things. 

We can all see the problem with this theory.   It simply is not possible for ANYTHING to exist due to evolutionary processes, because if we trace the path of every life-form and all other matter in the universe back to its beginning, ultimately we get back to the very first two particles in the universe, and they could not have made themselves, so where did they come from?

Here are some more suggestions evolution would have us believe that defy all logic and science. 

We are asked to believe that not only everything that exists evolved from two self-created particles or atoms, but that after they found each other, did the big bang thing, starting dividing which for rocks and minerals is impossible; then somehow these gasses, minerals, and chemical elements that resulted from the explosion, miraculously started forming into organic single-cell organisms, which further evolved into multi-cell organisms, then evolved into all forms of life we see today including Plantlife, insects, reptiles, birds, fish and aquatic life, animals and human beings.

We are asked to believe that somewhere along this incredible evolutionary road, the first biological life-forms on earth miraculously changed from single-cell organisms into multi-cell organisms, then further evolved into highly advanced life-forms that needed to multiply by a sexual process called procreation between a male and female of a species.  For this theory to be true, at some point non-intelligent creatures miraculously decided to change from asexual life-forms into sexual male and female life forms.

Somehow this incredible accident of nature had to know the perfect design for each gender, and the exact list of the body parts and organic matter required to produce a perfect male and female version of every species for reproduction to take place.  These parts include:  Reproductive organs, hormones, eggs, estrogen, sperm, testosterone, genetic codes, DNA, chemicals and proteins, the list goes on.

Evolution also had to know that this process required male and female versions of each species to develop at the same time, in perfect unison.  Why?  Because the male evolved first without a female, or visa-versa; after only one generation the first male or female would be dead and gone, with no offspring to procreate and carry on the species because this process requires a male and female to work.

And; even before we get to this point above, it goes without saying that an evolving creature cannot evolve unless it has all of the necessary parts at exactly the right time and in just the right order, for each body part of a life-form to support the other parts.

Example:  The first animals and human life-forms needed flesh, internal organs, an external organ of skin, bones, sinews, blood, brain, various necessary chemicals, proteins, hormones, and all other necessary parts, combined with an onboard fully self-contained self-generating electrical power system and circuitry to provide electrical impulses from the brain, [a mushy super-computer which itself is a miracle], through the nervous system to the nerve endings and back, and from nerve endings to brain and back, to make this incredible biological machine work and function.

All of these events had to occur at the same time.  Each part needed the other parts to feed and support each other to survive because human or animal body parts cannot survive on their own.  Imagine a body evolving without a mouth so it could not eat? Or; try to imagine a body without arms and/or legs, being immobile so it could not gather food to eat or get to a water source to drink?  We are expected to believe that not only humans and all other animals and life-forms evolved from something that did not exist in the first place, but that they evolved with all the right parts, at just the right time, in exactly the right order, to provide both male and female at the same time, and that these males and females all had to correct parts to be self-sufficient, reproduce and survive? This requires a level of faith that is frankly beyond belief.

To believe in evolution as a viable proposition to explain the existence of all matter and life-forms, we require two things:

  1. We require a level of faith so great, that it is beyond all reason and logic because; we have demonstrated that if we backtrack from all existing life forms and matter, right back to the very first two atoms or particles in the universe, we know that these two particles did not make themselves.  We know they had to have a beginning because nothing can make itself from nothing by an act of self-creation.  Even Steven Spielberg,  George Lucas, and Peter Jackson would have trouble selling this story with or without CGI effects.
  2. We are then faced with the fact that we do exist, that our existence could not have occurred as a result of evolution, therefore our existence demands a Creator.

For a person to still cling to a belief in evolution after consideration of these and other scientific facts, would suggest they simply don’t want to believe in a creator, regardless of the facts.  This denial of the facts and science may be embraced by some people because; if we accept the reality that the only possible explanation for our existence demands a creator, we are then faced with the question of why He created us, and what should we do about Him.

You may then ask; OK, I can see now that evolution cannot work, but if we were created, where did God come from?  This is a good question and a fair question.   The word of God says of God; ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last’; Revelation 22:13;

In the beginning, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was at the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him, nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.  John 1:1-18.

God has always been, He has always existed and He will always exist.  This is because God is a Spirit and spirits are immortal and eternal, just as our spirits are eternal.   We cannot easily grasp this concept because of our mortality, and the very short lifespan of our mortal bodies.

Whilst we cannot say where God came from, we can see the proof of His existence if we look, and we don’t have to look very far.  Part of that proof is you and me, and all of the matter we see in the universe.   Why?   Because if there is no creator, and yet we have just demonstrated that evolution is simply impossible, we have another huge problem.  If there were no Creator, and yet evolution is proved impossible by working backward through the process of elimination; HOW do we explain our existence?  How did we get here?   It is simply not possible for us to exist without the existence of a Creator, end of the story.

Moving on from this argument because we know that we exist and therefore we must have been created, the next BIG question is; who was it that created us, and why were we created?  That is the only important question left to be answered.

Since we can see the evidence and enormity of God’s creation in the universe, we must understand that God is awesome in power in ways that our tiny minds cannot begin to understand.  The universe is simply too enormous for us to understand or get our heads around because it has no beginning or end, but how can that be?  And, if the universe does end out there somewhere which is not possible, what is on the outside of that, and, what is on the outside of that and so on?  The human mind would go completely insane trying to fathom it all because it is just too big for us to take in.

So; back to God’s purpose in creating mankind?  Mankind is, without doubt, God’s greatest creation, because God made us in His very own image as described in His word, and we are fearfully and wonderfully made, Genesis 1:26-27The human body, brain or CPU, the human eye which is said to be the most advanced creatures on earth, and all the other parts of the human body are so intricate and masterfully made, they boggle the mind.

The primary reason God made mankind was; that God is Love, the essence and source of pure love, and He wanted to share His love with intelligent life-forms “mankind”, who would love Him back in return.   We can easily grasp this concept because we humans all have this God-given need inside us to love and to be loved. After all, we are made in God’s image and likeness.   This is why we marry, have children, and have pets like cats and dogs.  We are created to love and share companionship with other human beings, and the love and companionship we enjoy with pets reciprocate our love with devotion and loyalty to us in return.  This is well demonstrated by the strong natural bond and affinity between mankind and our best friend the dog.

God created mankind to love and to be loved in return.  Simply put, we were made by God, for God, to be loved by God, to love God, and for eternal communion, fellowship, and relationship with God as our Father and His children.   See the order of creation including the creation of mankind in Genesis chapters 1-3.

Unfortunately, mankind disobeyed God and as a result, we were separated from our Father Creator by a gulf of sin, because God is Holy and cannot look upon sin.

We will never feel complete or truly fulfilled in life without God, because we were created by Him, for Him, and fellowship with Him.

NO PURPOSE IN LIFE WITHOUT GOD:

As stated, we see in God’s Word that we were created by Him and that the purpose of our creation was to have a loving son and daughter relationship with our Father Creator.

So:  ’IF’ our Creator and God made us in His image, for us to have a relationship with Him for only a few short years, then we die, go to the grave, have no further consciousness after death, where the lights go out forever and that once dead, we go into the ground and that is that?  If that were the reality and our only purpose, then our entire existence would be a complete and absolute waste of time, and it would be better if we had never been created and born in the first place.  What a waste of time, emotions, and energy our lives would be if God had created us as nothing more than pets with a short shelf life, to play with for a while, to mess with us, then off to the grave with no further consciousness and nothing after that.

GOD’S ETERNAL PURPOSE AND PLAN FOR MANKIND:

Thankfully we see in God’s Word that He made us for a much higher purpose than that.   We see that God made us perfect, to live forever just as He does and that God created us in a very special way for a very special relationship with Him.  He created us in His image, like Himself, with an immortal and eternal spirit residing within us.  Then He gave us dominion over all of the earth’s resources and placed us in paradise.  A paradise we would have remained in had the first man and woman not blown it by falling into sin and disobedience.

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

 27 So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

 28  God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

 29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

 31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day; Genesis 1:26-31.

THE FALL OF MAN & SEPARATION FROM GOD:

When Adam and Eve, the first man and woman disobeyed God and fell into sin, the higher purposes for which God created us were aborted.   As we know, this resulted in mankind being separated from our Creator because God cannot look upon sin.  From that moment on, mankind lost the perfect loving relationship with their Father Creator.

The Fall of Man

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

 2  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “

 4  “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

 6  When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.  Genesis 3

A WAY BACK TO GOD:

If we now accept that we were created for a far higher purpose than we may have realized to date, that we were created for God, to love Him, and to be loved by Him, we now have two choices.

  • We can continue rejecting Him and eventually at the end of our lives, we will pay the ultimate price for that rejection, and that price is very high.
  • Or; we can choose The Way of the Cross.

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See The Way Of The Cross page:

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Charles Darwin’s Regret:

It may surprise many students of evolution to learn that in the closing days of his life, Charles Darwin returned to his faith in the bible. The following account is told by Lady Hope, of Northfield England, a wonderful Christian woman who was often at his bedside before he died.

It was one of those glorious autumn afternoons that we sometimes enjoy in England when I was asked to go in and sit with the well-known professor, Charles Darwin. He was almost bedridden for some months before he died. I used to feel when I saw him that his fine presence would make a grand picture for our Royal Academy; but never did I think so more strongly than on this particular occasion.

He was sitting up in bed, wearing a soft embroidered dressing gown, of rather a rich purple shade.

Propped up by pillows, he was gazing out on a far-stretching scene of woods and cornfields, which glowed in the light of one of those marvelous sunsets which are the beauty of Kent and Surrey. His noble forehead and fine features seem to be lit up with pleasure as I entered the room.

He waved his hand toward the window as he pointed out the scene beyond, while on the other hand, he held an open Bible, which he was always studying.

“What are you reading now?” I asked as I seated myself beside his bedside. Hebrews! He answered – “still Hebrews.  ‘The Royal Book’ I call it. Isn’t it grand?”

Then, placing his finger on certain passages, he commented on them.

I made some allusions to the strong opinions expressed by many persons on the history of the Creation, its grandeur, and then their treatment of the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis.

He seemed greatly distressed, his fingers twitched nervously, and a look of agony came over his face as he said: “I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything, and to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.

Then he paused, and after a few more sentences on “the holiness of God” and the “grandeur of this book,” looking at the Bible which he was holding tenderly all the time, he suddenly said: “I have a summer house in the garden which holds about thirty people. It is over there,” pointing through the open window. “I want you very much to speak there.  I know you read the Bible in the villages. Tomorrow afternoon I should like the servants on the place, some tenants, and a few of the neighbors; to gather there. Will you speak to them?”

“What shall I speak about?” I asked.

“Christ Jesus!” he replied in a clear, emphatic voice, adding in a lower tone, “and his salvation.  Is not that the best theme? And then I want you to sing some hymns with them.  You lead on your small instrument, do you not?”  The wonderful look of brightness and animation on his face as he said this I shall never forget, for he added:  “If you take the meeting at three o’clock this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in with the singing.”

How I wished I could have made a picture of the fine old man and his beautiful surroundings on that memorable day!

Was there ever a more dramatic scene?  The very soul of tragedy is here exposed to us!  Darwin, an enthusiast for the bible speaking about “The grandeur of this book,” reminded of that modern evolutionary movement in theology which, linked with skeptical criticism, has destroyed biblical faith in multitudes.  Darwin with a look of agony, deploring it all and declaring, “I was a young man with unformed ideas” What an overwhelming criticism!  The unformed ideas” of the young man Darwin are for many the basis of modern theology.

Oswald J. Smith, Lett.D., from an article in Prayer Crusade, published by the Little Church By The Sea, Inc.    Also published in Voices From The Edge Of Eternity by John Myers.

Creation or Accident: By Steve Hope

www.wouldjesusgothere.com 

See more proof of creation on this website:  Evolution – Fact or Fiction.   By: Dr. Steve Kumar.